Monthly Archives: April 2012

My father began composing daily emails with reflections on scripture from the Bible. In January 2010, he added me to his distribution list. I’ve saved all the emails and have been wanting to find a way to more adequately preserve them than just in a folder in my Mail program.

I thought about creating an ebook or something like that, but I wouldn’t be able to add to it very easily without adding future editions or volumes. What made most sense was creating a blog that could be updated daily with the daily reflection.

Therefore, I created “My Father’s Daily Minute“. I’ve only begun adding previous posts – I’ve got over 800 of them to get the site fully up to date.

Take a look and tell me what you think. If you like it, sign up for the updates from the site so you too can get his daily reflection.

The big musical weekend was capped with Linda’s studio piano recital. Anna and Emily played and did a wonderful job. Emily played Kabalevsky’s Five Variations on a Russian Folk Song Op 50, No 1 (mistakenly attributed to Latour in the video). Anna played Streabbog’s A Sad Story Op 63, No 12.

You can see more pictures of each of the students playing by looking at the top of the page under the top menu and mouse over “Piano Studio”. Click on the “Piano Recital April 2010” menu option.

Yesterday I told you that we sold our minivan, the Kia Sedona. We sold it because Linda got the car she’s been lusting after for about the past 6 months – a Toyota Prius V. She has always wanted a Prius, but didn’t feel it was right to ditch a minivan with all of its cargo capacity for such a small vehicle as the Prius. However, Toyota recently introduced the Prius V which is almost like driving a Prius minivan. It’s not quite as big, but it has plenty of cargo room. It only seats 5, but with our girls getting older, we don’t really need that 3rd row of seats now.

Importantly, the car gets about 43 miles per gallon – which is a whole lot better than 20 mpg that the minivan was getting.

We have fully fallen in love with the Prius V and everything about it – including the syncing with the iPhone and handsfree phone calls. I’m sure the car can do a lot more that we aren’t even aware.

This last week we sold our minivan, a 2003 Kia Sedona. This was the first vehicle we ever purchased new and we bought it as I was finishing medical school. This minivan was not our first (we had a used Ford Windstar previously), but it sure gave us a good run. The vehicle had 137,000 miles on it and saw our kids grow up from the start of kindergarten.

Many trips have been taken across town and across the country in the old Kia. Despite being such an inexpensive vehicle, it was really very dependable and we had actually planned to take two long trips this summer with it. However, the timing was right to purchase a new vehicle for Linda – one that she has been drooling over. I’ll tell you more about that vehicle in another post.

The good news about the Kia – it went to a family that just had a 3rd child and were in desperate need for an affordable minivan. They were good friends of a neighbor – a perfect situation for them and for us.

Today we celebrate the rising of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Six weeks of our Lenten journey has come to an end.

Many of us will be sitting in church, worshiping. There will be many faces that aren’t usually there. In fact, at our Catholic church, they’re often called “Easter Catholics”. However, I’m glad we are all there. Let us all celebrate together.

Faith, if practiced only in the confines of a church, synagogue, or mosque, demonstrates weakness, fear, or a lack of conviction. As such, it renders faith mediocre and lukewarm.

In our modern world where people of faith are constantly being challenged to keep their mouths shut or their opinions to themselves, we need to realize that could weaken our convictions and beliefs. Screaming, arguing, and proselytizing are not the answer, especially about controversial and challenging topics, but it is certainly important to make sure both sides are heard in a civil way. – Father Leo Patalinghug

Fr Leo, best known for Grace Before Meals , wrote the above statement in his recent Culinary Confessions blogpost.